A solo exhibition by Nick Roche • In association with the Wexford Literary Festival

As part of the Wexford Literary Festival, Nick Roche will be be interviewed this Sunday from 9.50am by Orla Rapple on The Sunday Grill – Beat 102-103 FM. Nick will discuss his exhibition Int-Roche-Spective at Wexford Arts Centre and his upcoming comic-book workshop on July 3rd as part of the festival. For further information and to book a place on the workshop please click here.

Wexford Arts Centre are pleased to present Int-Roche-Spective, a solo exhibition of illustration and drawing work by Wexford artist Nick Roche. The exhibition will run from Monday 29th February to Saturday 15th August at Wexford Arts Centre.

Nick is an artist for Marvel Comics on Amazing Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows, Spider-Man & Deadpool, Machine Man, Death’s Head, and is also well known for his work on IDW Publishing’s Transformers series of comics. His most notable work in this series is the multi-part Wreckers Saga, one of the franchise’s most acclaimed works.

Nick’s most recently published work was Rogue Trooper for the seminal 2000AD, and he is currently working on various Marvel and IDW covers including a Transformers/Terminator crossover as well as his own Irish-set suburban folk horror comic due for release later this year. Other notable work includes the all-ages horror comedy comic Monster Motors created with screenwriter Brian Lynch, the forthcoming Escape From Citytron videogame, and the ‘Last Of Our Kind’ album artwork and ‘Barbarian’ video animation for British rock group The Darkness.

‘The thing I’ve learned in my fifteen years as a full-time professional comic book artist is that it doesn’t matter HOW the image is made, it’s what it looks like in print that matters. I say this up front as a form of excuse and/or apology.

I work traditionally using pencils and inks on paper rather than drawing digitally using a graphics tablet. The upside of this means I can sell my original artwork. The downside is, I forget to do this, and subsequently live in a fire hazard. Artists who work in this method pencil the image first, and finalise it by inking over it, form of “Posh Tracing”. The drawback here is having to erase the sketch lines after as it is tedious and leaves one alone with intrusive and dark thoughts during the monotony. The eraser can often remove some of the inky blackness which leads me to further melancholy.

To avoid this, I draw with pencils on cheap paper (this gives ne freedom to go wild and make mistakes as I do not respect this paper) and then scan them into Photoshop, make corrections, convert them to blue line, and then print out onto A3-size Bristol Board. This is posh paper, the one you save for visitors, and I treat this with care and respect. Once completed, when I scan the final inks back into my computer to send to my editor/colourist/lucky beneficiary, I can tune out all the extraneous blue lines in Photoshop, leaving sharp black and white images. And it means I didn’t have to spend ages rubbing out pencil marks, causing me to think of the terrible things I’ve done.

The artwork displayed here all comes from this process, with my inks applied over large blue-line print outs of my original loosely pencilled pages. If you look closely, you can see writing in the borders telling me which corrections to make once they’re scanned in, and possible the odd takeaway number too. Luckily, all this is removed in the final print version, making me appear as the professional I so clearly am not.

– Nick Roche, June 2020